During a series of magnetic recording disk manufacturing operations, a disk's surface is exposed to various types of contaminants. Any material present in a manufacturing operation is a potential source of contamination. For example, sources of contamination may include process gases, chemicals, deposition materials, and liquids. The various contaminants may be deposited on the disk's surface in particulate form. If the particulate contamination is not removed, it may interfere with the proper fabrication of a magnetic recording disk. Therefore, it is necessary to clean contamination from the surface of the disk at one or more stages in the manufacturing process, such as post sputtering.
Contamination may be removed using sonication and rinsing techniques. Conventionally, a disk is submerged in a sonication tank to remove a majority of the particles from the disk's surface and then moved to another, rinse, tank to further remove lose particles in water that is cleaner than that in the sonication tank. Such sonication cleaning and rinse cleaning operations have conventionally been performed in separate cleaning tanks.